Ethnicity without groups

I. Common sense groupism

F science concepts would seem as basic, even indis-

pensable, as that of group. In disciplinary terms, group would appear
to be a core concept for sociology, political science, anthropology,
demography and social psychology. In substantive terms, it would seem
to be fundamental to the study of political mobilization, cultural iden-
tity, economic interests, social class, status groups, collective action,
kinship, gender, religion, ethnicity, race, multiculturalism, and minori-
ties of every kind.
Yet despite this seeming centrality, the concept group has remained
curiously unscrutinized in recent years. There is, to be sure, a substantial
social psychological literature addressing the concept (Hamilton et al.
, McGrath ), but this has had little resonance outside that
sub-discipline. Elsewhere in the social sciences, the recent literature
addressing the concept group is sparse, especially by comparison with
the immense literature on such concepts as class, identity, gender, eth-
nicity, or multiculturalismtopics in which the concept group is
implicated, yet seldom analyzed its own terms (). Group functions as
a seemingly unproblematic, taken-for-granted concept, apparently in no
need of particular scrutiny or explication. As a result, we tend to take for
granted not only the concept group, but also groupsthe putative
things-in-the-world to which the concept refers.
Earlier versions of this paper were presented Liana Grancea, David Laitin, Mara Loveman,
to the conference Facing Ethnic Conicts, Emanuel Scheglo, Peter Stamatov, Peter
Center for Development Research, University Waldmann, and Andreas Wimmer for helpful
of Bonn, December , ; the Working written comments.
Group on Ethnicity and Nationalism, UCLA, () Foundational discussions include Coo-
January , ; the Anthropology Collo- ley [], chapter and Homans in
quium, University of Chicago, February , sociology; Nadel , chapter in anthropo-
; and the Central European University, logy; Bentley , chapter and Truman
Budapest, March , . Thanks to partici- in political science. More recent discus-
pants in these events for their comments and sions include Olson , Tilly and
criticisms, and to Margit Feischmidt, Jon Fox, Hechter .

Rogers B, University of California (Los Angeles).
Arch. europ. sociol., XLIII, (), --//-$. per art + $. per page A.E.S.

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My aim in this paper is not to enter into conceptual or denitional

casuistry about the concept of group. It is rather to address one problem-
atic consequence of this tendency to take groups for granted in the study
of ethnicity, race and nationhood, and in the study of ethnic, racial and
national conict in particular. This is what I will call groupism: the
tendency to take discrete, sharply dierentiated, internally homo-
geneous and externally bounded groups as basic constituents of social
life, chief protagonists of social conicts, and fundamental units of
social analysis (). In the domain of ethnicity, nationalism and race, I
mean by groupism the tendency to treat ethnic groups, nations and
races as substantial entities to which interests and agency can be attrib-
uted. I mean the tendency to reify such groups, speaking of Serbs,
Croats, Muslims and Albanians in the former Yugoslavia, of Catholics
and Protestants in Northern Ireland, of Jews and Palestinians in Israel
and the occupied territories, of Turks and Kurds in Turkey, or of
Blacks, Whites, Asians, Hispanics and Native Americans in the U.S. as if
they were internally homogeneous, externally bounded groups, even
unitary collective actors with common purposes. I mean the tendency to
represent the social and cultural world as a multichrome mosaic of
monochrome ethnic, racial or cultural blocs.
From the perspective of broader developments in social theory, the
persisting strength of groupism in this sense is surprising. After all,
several distinct traditions of social analysis have challenged the treat-
ment of groups as real, substantial things-in-the-world. These include
such sharply diering enterprises as ethnomethodology and conversa-
tion analysis, social network theory, cognitive theory, feminist theory,
and individualist approaches such as rational choice and game theory.
More generally, broadly structuralist approaches have yielded to a
variety of more constructivist theoretical stances, which tendat the
level of rhetoric, at leastto see groups as constructed, contingent, and
uctuating. And a diuse postmodernist sensibility emphasizes the
fragmentary, the ephemeral, and the erosion of xed forms and clear
boundaries. These developments are disparate, even contradictory in
analytical style, methodological orientation and epistemological com-
mitments. Network theory, with its methodological (and sometimes
ontological) relationalism (Emirbayer and Goodwin ; Wellman
() In this very general sense, groupism groups based on combinations of these cat-
extends well beyond the domain of ethnicity, egorical attributes. Yet while recognizing that
race and nationalism to include accounts of it is a wider tendency in social analysis, I limit
putative groups based on gender, sexuality, my discussion here to groupism in the study of
age, class, abledness, religion, minority status, ethnicity, race and nationalism.
and any kind of culture, as well as putative

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) is opposed to rational choice theory, with its methodological (and

sometimes ontological) individualism; both are sharply and similarly
opposed, in analytical style and epistemological commitments, to post-
modernist approaches. Yet these and other developments have converg-
ed in problematizing groupness and undermining axioms of stable
group being.
Challenges to groupism, however, have been uneven. They have
been strikingto take just one examplein the study of class, especially
in the study of the working class, a term that is hard to use today without
quotation marks or some other distancing device. Yet ethnic groups
continue to be understood as entities and cast as actors. To be sure,
constructivist approaches of one kind or another are now dominant in
academic discussions of ethnicity. Yet everyday talk, policy analysis,
media reports, and even much ostensibly constructivist academic writ-
ing routinely frame accounts of ethnic, racial and national conict in
groupist terms as the struggles of ethnic groups, races, and nations ().
Somehow, when we talk about ethnicity, and even more so when we talk
about ethnic conict, we almost automatically nd ourselves talking
about ethnic groups.
Now it might be asked: Whats wrong with this? After all, it seems
to be mere common sense to treat ethnic struggles as the struggles of
ethnic groups, and ethnic conict as conict between such groups. I
agree that this is theor at least acommon-sense view of the matter.
But we cannot rely on common sense here. Ethnic common sensethe
tendency to partition the social world into putatively deeply constituted,
quasi-natural intrinsic kinds (Hirschfeld )is a key part of what we
want to explain, not what we want to explain things with; it belongs to
our empirical data, not to our analytical toolkit (). Cognitive anthro-
pologists and social psychologists have accumulated a good deal of evi-
dence about common-sense ways of carving up the social worldabout
what Lawrence Hirschfeld () has called folk sociologies. The evi-
dence suggests that some common sense social categoriesand notably
() For useful critical analyses of media can also serve as a resource for analysts. But as
representations of ethnic violence, see the col- Emanuel Scheglo notes in another context,
lection of essays in Allen and Seaton , as with respect to the category interruption, the
well as Seaton . fact that this is a vernacular, common-sense
() This is perhaps too sharply put. To the category for participants does not make it a
extent that such intrinsic-kind categories are rst-order category usable for professional
indeed constitutive of common-sense under- analysis. Rather than being employed in pro-
standings of the social world, to the extent that fessional analysis, it is better treated as a target
such categories are used as a resource for par- category for professional analysis (: ).
ticipants, and are demonstrably deployed or The same might well be said of common sense
oriented to by participants in interaction, they ethnic categories.

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common sense ethnic and racial categoriestend to be essentializing

and naturalizing (Rothbart and Taylor ; Hirschfeld ; Gil-
White ). They are the vehicles of what has been called a partici-
pants primordialism (Smith : ) or a psychological essential-
ism (Medin ). We obviously cannot ignore such common sense
primordialism. But that does not mean we should simply replicate it in
our scholarly analyses or policy assessments. As analysts of naturaliz-
ers, we need not be analytic naturalizers (Gil-White : ).
Instead, we need to break with vernacular categories and common-
sense understandings. We need to break, for example, with the seeming-
ly obvious and uncontroversial point that ethnic conict involves conict
between ethnic groups. I want to suggest that ethnic conictor what
might better be called ethnicized or ethnically framed conictneed
not, and should not, be understood as conict between ethnic groups, just
as racial or racially framed conict need not be understood as conict
between races, or nationally framed conict as conict between nations.
Participants, of course, regularly do represent ethnic, racial and
national conict in such groupist, even primordialist terms. They often
cast ethnic groups, races or nations as the protagoniststhe heroes and
martyrsof such struggles. But this is no warrant for analysts to do so.
We must, of course, take vernacular categories and participants
understandings seriously, for they are partly constitutive of our objects
of study. But we should not uncritically adopt categories of ethnopolitical
practice as our categories of social analysis. Apart from the general unre-
liability of ethnic common sense as a guide for social analysis, we should
remember that participants accountsespecially those of specialists in
ethnicity such as ethnopolitical entrepreneurs, who, unlike nonspecial-
ists, may live o as well as for ethnicityoften have what Pierre
Bourdieu has called a performative character. By invoking groups, they
seek to evoke them, summon them, call them into being. Their catego-
ries are for doingdesigned to stir, summon, justify, mobilize, kindle and
energize. By reifying groups, by treating them as substantial things-in-
the-world, ethnopolitical entrepreneurs may, as Bourdieu notes,
contribute to producing what they apparently describe or des-
ignate (a: ) ().
Reication is a social process, not simply an intellectual bad habit. As
a social process, it is central to the practice of politicized ethnicity. And
() Such performative, group-making prac- zation and representation (Bourdieu b:
tices, of course, are not specic to ethnic -).
entrepreneurs, but generic to political mobili-

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appropriately so. To criticize ethnopolitical entrepreneurs for reifying

ethnic groups would be a kind of category mistake. Reifying groups is
precisely what ethnopolitical entrepreneurs are in the business of doing.
When they are successful, the political ction of the unied group can be
momentarily yet powerfully realized in practice. As analysts, we should
certainly try to account for the ways in whichand conditions under
whichthis practice of reication, this powerful crystallization of
group feeling, can work. This may be one of the most important tasks of
the theory of ethnic conict. But we should avoid unintentionally doub-
ling or reinforcing the reication of ethnic groups in ethnopolitical prac-
tice with a reication of such groups in social analysis.

II. Beyond groupism

How, then, are we to understand ethnic conict, if not in common

sense terms as conict between ethnic groups? And how can we go
beyond groupism? Here I sketch eight basic points and then, in the next
section, draw out some implications of them. In the nal section, I
illustrate the argument by considering one empirical case.

Rethinking ethnicity
We need to rethink not only ethnic conict, but also what we mean by
ethnicity itself. This is not a matter of seeking agreement on a denition.
The intricate and ever-recommencing denitional casuistry in studies of
ethnicity, race and nationalism has done little to advance the discussion,
and indeed can be viewed as a symptom of the non-cumulative nature of
research in the eld. It is rather a matter of critically scrutinizing our
conceptual tools. Ethnicity, race and nation should be conceptualized
not as substances or things or entities or organisms or collective
individualsas the imagery of discrete, concrete, tangible, bounded and
enduring groups encourages us to dobut rather in relational, pro-
cessual, dynamic, eventful and disaggregated terms. This means think-
ing of ethnicity, race and nation not in terms of substantial groups or
entities but in terms of practical categories, cultural idioms, cognitive
schemas, discursive frames, organizational routines, institutional forms,
political projects and contingent events. It means thinking of ethnicization,
racialization and nationalization as political, social, cultural and psycho-
logical processes. And it means taking as a basic analytical category not
the group as an entity but groupness as a contextually uctuating

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conceptual variable. Stated baldly in this fashion, these are of course

mere slogans; I will try to ll them out a bit in what follows.

The reality of ethnicity

To rethink ethnicity, race and nationhood along these lines is in no
way to dispute their reality, minimize their power or discount their
signicance; it is to construe their reality, power and signicance in a
dierent way. Understanding the reality of race, for example, does not
require us to posit the existence of races. Racial idioms, ideologies, nar-
ratives, categories and systems of classication and racialized ways of
seeing, thinking, talking and framing claims are real and consequential,
especially when they are embedded in powerful organizations. But the
reality of raceand even its overwhelming coercive power in some
settingsdoes not depend on the existence of races. Similarly, the
reality of ethnicity and nationhood and the overriding power of ethnic
and national identications in some settingsdoes not depend on the
existence of ethnic groups or nations as substantial groups or entities.

Groupness as event
Shifting attention from groups to groupness and treating groupness
as variable and contingent rather than xed and given (), allows us to
take account ofand, potentially, to account forphases of extraordi-
nary cohesion and moments of intensely felt collective solidarity,
without implicitly treating high levels of groupness as constant, endur-
ing or denitionally present. It allows us to treat groupness as an event,
as something that happens, as E. P. Thompson famously said about
class. At the same time, it keeps us analytically attuned to the possibility
that groupness may not happen, that high levels of groupness may fail to
crystallize, despite the group-making eorts of ethnopolitical entrepre-
neurs and even in situations of intense elite-level ethnopolitical conict.
Being analytically attuned to negative instances in this way enlarges the
domain of relevant cases and helps correct for the bias in the literature
toward the study of striking instances of high groupness, successful
mobilization or conspicuous violencea bias that can engender an
overethnicized view of the social world, a distorted representation of
whole world regions as seething cauldrons of ethnic tension (Brubaker
) and an overestimation of the incidence of ethnic violence (Fearon
() For accounts (not focused specically on one another, focus on variability in groupness
ethnicity) that treat groupness as variable, see across cases; my concern is primarily with
Tilly : ff; Hechter : ; Hamilton et variability in groupness over time.
al. . These accounts, very dierent from

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and Laitin ). Sensitivity to such negative instances can also direct

potentially fruitful analytical attention toward the problem of explaining
failed eorts at ethnopolitical mobilization.

Groups and categories

Much talk about ethnic, racial or national groups is obscured by the
failure to distinguish between groups and categories. If by group we
mean a mutually interacting, mutually recognizing, mutually oriented,
eectively communicating, bounded collectivity with a sense of solidar-
ity, corporate identity and capacity for concerted action, or even if we
adopt a less exigent understanding of group, it should be clear that a
category is not a group (Sacks , I: , ; Handelman ;
McKay and Lewins ; Jenkins : ff) (). It is at best a potential
basis for group-formation or groupness ().
By distinguishing consistently between categories and groups, we can
problematizerather than presumethe relation between them. We
can ask about the degree of groupness associated with a particular cat-
egory in a particular setting and about the political, social, cultural
and psychological processes through which categories get invested
with groupness (Petersen ). We can ask how peopleand
organizationsdo things with categories. This includes limiting access to
scarce resources or particular domains of activity by excluding catego-
rically distinguished outsiders (Weber []: ff, ff; Barth
; Brubaker ; Tilly ), but it also includes more mundane
actions such as identifying or classifying oneself or others (Levine )
or simply doing being ethnic in an ethnomethodological sense (Moer-
man ). We can analyze the organizational and discursive careers of
categoriesthe processes through which they become institutionalized
and entrenched in administrative routines (Tilly ) and embedded in
culturally powerful and symbolically resonant myths, memories and
narratives (Armstrong ; Smith ). We can study the politics of
() Fredrik Barths introductory essay to the English translationethnic commonality,
the collection Ethnic Groups and Boundaries based on belief in common descent, is in itself
() was extraordinarily inuential in direct- mere (putative) commonality [(geglaubte)
ing attention to the workings of categories of Gemeinsamkeit], not community [Gemein-
self- and other-ascription. But Barth does not schaft] [...] but only a factor facilitating com-
distinguish sharply or consistently between munal action [Vergemeinschaftung] (:
categories and groups and his central metaphor ; cf. : ). Ethnic commonality means
of boundary carries with it connotations of more than mere category membership for
boundedness, entitativity and groupness. Weber. It isor rather involvesa category
() This point was already made by Max that is employed by members themselves. But
Weber, albeit in somewhat dierent terms. this shows that even self-categorization does
As Weber arguedin a passage obscured in not create a group.

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categories, both from above and from below. From above, we can focus
on the ways in which categories are proposed, propagated, imposed,
institutionalized, discursively articulated, organizationally entrenched
and generally embedded in multifarious forms of governmentality
(Noiriel ; Slezkine ; Brubaker ; Torpey ; Martin
). From below, we can study the micropolitics of categories, the
ways in which the categorized appropriate, internalize, subvert, evade or
transform the categories that are imposed on them (Domnguez ).
And drawing on advances in cognitive research, ethnomethodology and
conversation analysis (), we can study the sociocognitive and interac-
tional processes through which categories are used by individuals to
make sense of the social world; linked to stereotypical beliefs and
expectations about category members (); invested with emotional
associations and evaluative judgments; deployed as resources in specic
interactional contexts; and activated by situational triggers or cues. A
focus on categories, in short, can illuminate the multifarious ways in
which ethnicity, race and nationhood can exist and work without the
existence of ethnic groups as substantial entities. It can help us envision
ethnicity without groups.

Group-making as project
If we treat groupness as a variable and distinguish between groups
and categories, we can attend to the dynamics of group-making as a
social, cultural and political project, aimed at transforming categories
() Ethnomethodology and conversation being referred to is equally a member. For
analysis have not focused on the use of ethnic Sacks on categories, see : I, -, -
categories as such, but Sacks, Scheglo and , -, -; II, -.
others have addressed the problem of situated () The language of stereotypes is, of
categorization in general, notably the question course, that of cognitive social psychology (for
of the procedures through which participants a review of work in this tradition, see Hamilton
in interaction, in deploying categories, choose and Sherman ). But the general ethno-
among alternative sets of categories (since methodological emphasis on the crucial
there is always more than one set of categories importance of the rich though tacit back-
in terms of which any person can be correctly ground knowledge that participants bring to
described). The import of this problem has interaction andmore specicallyHarvey
been formulated as follows by Scheglo (: Sacks discussion of the inference-rich cat-
-): And given the centrality of [...] cate- egories in terms of which much everyday social
gories in organizing vernacular cultural knowledge is stored (: I, ff et passim; cf.
knowledge, this equivocality can be pro- Scheglo : ff) and of the way in which
foundly consequential, for which category is the knowledge thus organized is protected
employed will carry with it the invocation of against induction (ibid., ff), suggest a
common-sense knowledge about that category domain of potentially converging concern
of person and bring it to bear on the person between cognitive work on the one hand and
referred to on some occasion, rather than ethnomethodological and conversation-
bringing to bear the knowledge implicated analytic work on the otherhowever dierent
with another category, of which the person their analytic stances and methodologies.

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into groups or increasing levels of groupness (Bourdieu a, b).

Sometimes this is done in quite a cynical fashion. Ethnic and other
insurgencies, for example, often adopt what is called in French a politique
du pire, a politics of seeking the worst outcome in the short run so as to
bolster their legitimacy or improve their prospects in the longer run.
When the small, ill-equipped, ragtag Kosovo Liberation Army stepped
up its attacks on Serb policemen and other targets in early , for
example, this was done as a deliberateand successfulstrategy of
provoking massive regime reprisals. As in many such situations, the
brunt of the reprisals was borne by civilians. The cycle of attacks and
counterattacks sharply increased groupness among both Kosovo Alban-
ians and Kosovo Serbs, generated greater support for the KLA among
both Kosovo and diaspora Albanians and bolstered KLA recruitment
and funding. This enabled the KLA to mount a more serious challenge
to the regime, which in turn generated more brutal regime reprisals and
so on. In this sense, group crystallization and polarization were the
result of violence, not the cause (Brubaker ).
Of course, this group-making strategy employed in the late s did
not start from scratch. It had already begun with relatively high levels of
groupness, a legacy of earlier phases of conict. The propitious raw
materials the KLA had to work with no doubt help explain the success
of its strategy. Not all group-making projects succeed and those that do
succeed (more or less) do so in part as a result of the cultural and psy-
chological materials they have to work with. These materials include not
only, or especially, deep, longue-dure cultural structures such as the
mythomoteurs highlighted by Armstrong () and Smith (), but
also the moderately durable ways of thinking and feeling that represent
middle-range legacies of historical experience and political action. Yet
while such raw materialsthemselves the product and precipitate of
past struggles and predicamentsconstrain and condition the possibil-
ities for group-making in the present, there remains considerable scope
for deliberate group-making strategies. Certain dramatic events, in par-
ticular, can serve to galvanize and crystallize a potential group, or to
ratchet up pre-existing levels of groupness. This is why deliberate vio-
lence, undertaken as a strategy of provocation, often by a very small
number of persons, can sometimes be an exceptionally eective strategy
of group-making.

Groups and organizations

Although participants rhetoric and common sense accounts treat
ethnic groups as the protagonists of ethnic conict, in fact the chief

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protagonists of most ethnic conictand a fortiori of most ethnic

violenceare not ethnic groups as such but various kinds of organiza-
tions, broadly understood and their empowered and authorized incum-
bents. These include states (or more broadly autonomous polities) and
their organizational components such as particular ministries, of-
ces, law enforcement agencies and armed forces units; they include
terrorist groups, paramilitary organizations, armed bands and loosely
structured gangs; and they include political parties, ethnic associations,
social movement organizations, churches, newspapers, radio and televi-
sion stations and so on. Some of these organizations may represent
themselves, or may be seen by others, as organizations of and for par-
ticular ethnic groups (). But even when this is the case, organizations
cannot be equated with ethnic groups. It is because and insofar as they
are organizations and possess certain material and organizational
resources, that they (or more precisely their incumbents) are capable of
organized action and thereby of acting as more or less coherent pro-
tagonists in ethnic conict (). Although common sense and partici-
pants rhetoric attribute discrete existence, boundedness, coherence,
identity, interest and agency to ethnic groups, these attributes are in fact
characteristic of organizations. The IRA, KLA and PKK claim to speak
and act in the name of the (Catholic) Irish, the Kosovo Albanians and
the Kurds; but surely analysts must dierentiate between such organi-
zations and the putatively homogeneous and bounded groups in whose
name they claim to act. The point applies not only to military, parami-
litary and terrorist organizations, of course, but to all organizations that
claim to speak and act in the name of ethnic, racial or national groups
(Heisler ).
A fuller and more rounded treatment of this theme, to be sure, would
require several qualications that I can only gesture at here. Conict and
violence vary in the degree to which, as well as the manner in which,
organizations are involved. What Donald Horowitz () has called the
deadly ethnic riot, for example, diers sharply from organized ethnic
insurgencies or terrorist campaigns. Although organizations (sometimes
ephemeral ones) may play an important role in preparing, provoking and
permitting such riots, much of the actual violence is committed by
broader sets of participants acting in relatively spontaneous fashion and
in starkly polarized situations characterized by high levels of groupness.
() One should remember, though, that tion perspective on social movements, eclipsed
organizations often compete with one another in recent years by identity-oriented new social
for the monopolization of the right to re- movement theory, has much to oer students
present the same (putative) group. of ethnicity. For an integrated statement, see
() In this respect the resource mobiliza- McCarthy and Zald .

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Moreover, even where organizations are the core protagonists, they may
depend on a penumbra of ancillary or supportive action on the part
of sympathetic non-members. The representativeness of organi-
zationsthe degree to which an organization can justiably claim to
represent the will, express the interests and enjoy the active or passive
support of its constituentsis enormously variable, not only between
organizations, but also over time and across domains. In addition, while
organizations are ordinarily the protagonists of conict and violence,
they are not always the objects or targets of conict and violence. Entire
population categoriesor putative groupscan be the objects of organ-
ized action, much more easily than they can be the subjects or underta-
kers of such action. Finally, even apart from situations of violence, eth-
nic conict may be at least partly amorphous, carried out not by orga-
nizations as such but spontaneously by individuals through such everyday
actions as shunning, insults, demands for deference or conform-
ity, or withholdings of routine interactional tokens of acknowledgment
or respect (Bailey ). Still, despite these qualications, it is clear that
organizations, not ethnic groups as such, are the chief protagonists of
ethnic conict and ethnic violence and that the relationship between
organizations and the groups they claim to represent is often deeply
ambiguous.

Framing and coding ()

If the protagonists of ethnic conict cannot, in general, be considered
ethnic groups, then what makes such conict count as ethnic conict?
And what makes violence count as ethnic violence? Similar questions
can be asked about racial and national conict and violence. The answer
cannot be found in the intrinsic properties of behavior. The ethnic
quality of ethnic violence, for example, is not intrinsic to violent
conduct itself; it is attributed to instances of violent behavior by perpetra-
tors, victims, politicians, oicials, journalists, researchers, relief work-
ers or others. Such acts of framing and narrative encoding do not simply
interpret the violence; they constitute it as ethnic.
Framing may be a key mechanism through which groupness is
constructed. The metaphor of framing was popularized by Goman
(), drawing on Bateson []. The notion has been elaborated
chiey in the social movement literature (Snow et al. ; Snow and
Benford ; Gamson and Modigliani ; Gamson ; uniting
rational choice and framing approaches, Esser ). When ethnic fram-
() These paragraphs draw on Brubaker and Laitin .

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ing is successful, we may see conict and violence not only in ethnic,
but in groupist terms. Although such imputed groupness is the product
of prevailing interpretive frames, not necessarily a measure of the
groupness felt and experienced by the participants in an event, a com-
pelling ex post interpretive framing or encoding may exercise a powerful
feedback eect, shaping subsequent experience and increasing levels of
groupness. A great deal is at stake, then, in struggles over the interpre-
tive framing and narrative encoding of conict and violence.
Interpretive framing, of course, is often contested. Violenceand
more generally, conictis regularly accompanied by social struggles to
label, interpret and explain it. Such metaconicts or conict[s] over
the nature of the conict, as Donald Horowitz has called them (: ),
do not simply shadow conicts from the outside, but are integral and
consequential parts of the conicts. To impose a label or prevailing
interpretive frameto cause an event to be seen as a pogrom or a riot
or a rebellionis no mere matter of external interpretation, but a
constitutive act of social denition that can have important conse-
quences (Brass b). Social struggles over the proper coding and
interpretation of conict and violence are therefore important subjects
of study in their own right (Brass a, , Abelmann and Lie ).
Coding and framing practices are heavily inuenced by prevailing
interpretive frames. Today, ethnic and national frames are accessible and
legitimate, suggesting themselves to actors and analysts alike. This
generates a coding bias in the ethnic direction. And this, in turn, may
lead us to overestimate the incidence of ethnic conict and violence by
unjustiably seeing ethnicity everywhere at work (Bowen ). Actors
may take advantage of this coding bias and of the generalized legitimacy
of ethnic and national frames, by strategically using ethnic framing to
mask the pursuit of clan, clique or class interests. The point here is not
to suggest that clans, cliques or classes are somehow more real than
ethnic groups, but simply to note the existence of structural and cultural
incentives for strategic framing.

Ethnicity as cognition ()
These observations about the constitutive signicance of coding and
framing suggest a nal point about the cognitive dimension of ethnicity.
Ethnicity, race and nationhood exist only in and through our percep-
tions, interpretations, representations, categorizations and identica-
tions. They are not things in the world, but perspectives on the
() These paragraphs draw on Brubaker et al. .

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world (). These include ethnicized ways of seeing (and ignoring), of

construing (and misconstruing), of inferring (and misinferring), of
remembering (and forgetting). They include ethnically oriented frames,
schemas and narratives and the situational cues that activate them, such
as the ubiquitous televised images that have played such an important
role in the latest intifada. They include systems of classication, cat-
egorization and identication, formal and informal. And they include
the tacit, taken-for-granted background knowledge, embodied in per-
sons and embedded in institutionalized routines and practices, through
which people recognize and experience objects, places, persons, actions
or situations as ethnically, racially or nationally marked or meaningful.
Cognitive perspectives, broadly understood (), can help advance
constructivist research on ethnicity, race and nationhood, which has
stalled in recent years as it has grown complacent with success. Instead
of simply asserting that ethnicity, race and nationhood are constructed,
they can help specify how they are constructed. They can help specify
howand whenpeople identify themselves, perceive others, ex-
perience the world and interpret their predicaments in racial, ethnic or
national rather than other terms. They can help specify how groupness
can crystallize in some situations while remaining latent and merely
potential in others. And they can help link macro-level outcomes with
micro-level processes.

III. Implications

At this point a critic might interject: What is the point of all this?
Even if we can study ethnicity without groups, why should we?
Concepts invariably simplify the world; that the concept of discrete and
bounded ethnic groups does so, suggesting something more substantial
and clear-cut than really exists, cannot be held against it. The concept of
() As Emanuel Scheglo reminded me in anti-) Parsonian cognitive turn (DiMaggio
a dierent context, this formulation is poten- and Powell ) in sociological and (more
tially misleading, since perspectives on the broadly) social theory, especially in response to
worldas every Sociology student is the inuence of phenomenological and ethno-
taughtare themselves in the world and every methodological work (Schutz ; Garnkel
bit as real and consequential as other sorts of ; Heritage ). Cognitive perspectives
things. are central to the inuential syntheses of
() Cognitive perspectives, in this broad Bourdieu and Giddens andin a very dierent
sense, include not only those developed in formto the enterprise of conversation analy-
cognitive psychology and cognitive anthropo- sis.
logy but also those developed in the post- (and

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ethnic group may be a blunt instrument, but it is good enough as a rst

approximation. This talk about groupness and framing and practical
categories and cognitive schemas is all well and good, but meanwhile the
killing goes on. Does the critique matter in the real world, orif at
allonly in the ivory tower? What practical dierence does it make?
I believe the critique of groupism does have implications, albeit
rather general ones, for the ways in which researchers, journalists, pol-
icymakers, NGOs and others come to terms, analytically and practically,
with what we ordinarilythough perhaps too readilycall ethnic
conict and ethnic violence. Here I would like to enumerate ve of these,
before going on in the nal section to discuss an empirical case.
First, sensitivity to framing dynamics, to the generalized coding bias
in favor of ethnicity and to the sometimes strategic or even cynical use of
ethnic framing to mask the pursuit of clan, clique or class interests can
alert us to the risk of over-ethnicized or overly groupist interpretations
of (and interventions in) situations of conict and violence (Bowen
). One need not subscribe to a reductionist elite manipulation view
of politicized ethnicity (Brubaker ) to acknowledge that the spin
put on conicts by participants may conceal as much as it reveals and
that the representation of conicts as conicts between ethnic or nation-
al groups may obscure the interests at stake and the dynamics involved.
What is represented as ethnic conict or ethnic warsuch as the vio-
lence in the former Yugoslavia, may have as much or more to do with
thuggery, warlordship, opportunistic looting and black-market pro-
teering than with ethnicity (Mueller ; cf. Collier ).
Second, recognition of the centrality of organizations in ethnic
conict and ethnic violence, of the often equivocal character of their
leaders claims to speak and act in the name of ethnic groups and of the
performative nature of ethnopolitical rhetoric, enlisted in the service of
group-making projects, can remind us not to mistake groupist rhetoric
for real groupness, the putative groups of ethnopolitical rhetoric for
substantial things-in-the-world.
Third, awareness of the interest that ethnic and nationalist leaders
may have in living off politics, as well as for politics, to borrow the classic
distinction of Max Weber (: ), and awareness of the possible
divergence between the interests of leaders and those of their putative
constituents, can keep us from accepting at face value leaders claims
about the beliefs, desires and interests of their constituents.
Fourth, sensitivity to the variable and contingent, waxing and waning
nature of groupness and to the fact that high levels of groupness may be
more the result of conict (especially violent conict) than its under-

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lying cause, can focus our analytical attention and policy interventions
on the processes through which groupness tends to develop and crys-
tallize and those through which it may subside. Some attention has been
given recently to the former, including tipping and cascade mechanisms
(Laitin , Kuran ) and mechanisms governing the activation and
diusion of schemas and the epidemiology of representations (Sperber
). But declining curves of groupness have not been studied system-
atically, although they are just as important, theoretically and practically.
Once ratcheted up to a high level, groupness does not remain there out
of inertia. If not sustained at high levels through specic social and
cognitive mechanisms, it will tend to decline, as everyday interests
reassert themselves, through a process of what Weber (in a dierent but
apposite context [ (): -]) called routinization (Verall-
taeglichung, literally towards everydayness).
Lastly, a disaggregating, non-groupist approach can bring into ana-
lytical and policy focus the critical importance of intra-ethnic mecha-
nisms in generating and sustaining putatively interethnic conict (Bru-
baker and Laitin : ). These include in-group policing,
monitoring, or sanctioning processes (Laitin ); the ethnic outbid-
ding through which electoral competition can foster extreme ethnici-
zation (Rothschild ; Horowitz ); the calculated instigation or
provocation of conict with outsiders by vulnerable incumbents seeking
to deect in-group challenges to their positions; and in-group processes
bearing on the dynamics of recruitment into gangs, militias, terrorist
groups or guerrilla armies, including honoring, shaming and shunning
practices, rituals of manhood, intergenerational tensions and the prom-
ising and provision of material and symbolic rewards for martyrs.

IV. Ethnicity at work in a Transylvanian town

At this point, I would like to add some esh to the bare-bones ana-
lytical argument sketched above. It is tempting to comment on the
United States. It would be easy to score rhetorical points by emphasiz-
ing that the groups taken to constitute the canonical ethnoracial pen-
tagon (Hollinger )African Americans, Asian Americans, Whites,
Native Americans and Latinosare (with the partial exception of
African Americans) not groups at all but categories, backed by political
entrepreneurs and entrenched in governmental and other organizational
routines of social counting and accounting (Oice of Manage-

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ment and Budget ). It would be easy to highlight the enormous

cultural heterogeneity within these and other putative groups, and the
minimal degree of groupness associated with many ethnic categories in
the US (Gans ; Heisler ).
But rather than take this tack, I will try to address a harder case,
drawn from a region historically characterized by much higher degrees
of ethnic and national groupness. I want to consider briey how ethnic-
ity works in an East Central European context characterized by contin-
uous and often intense elite-level ethnonational conict since the fall of
communism (and, of course, by a much longer history of ethnonational
tension). Here too, I want to suggest, we can fruitfully analyze ethnicity
without groups.
The setting, familiar to me from eld research conducted in the
second half of the s, is the city of Cluj, the main administrative,
economic and cultural center of the Transylvanian region of Romania.
Of the approximately , residents, a substantial minority
somewhere between and percentidentify themselves as Hunga-
rian by ethnocultural nationality (). The city, as I indicated, has been
the site of protracted and seemingly intractable ethnonational conict
since the collapse of the Ceausescu regime in December . But this is
not, I will argue, best understood as a conict between ethnic or national
groups. To think of it as a conict between groups is to conate cate-
gories (Hungarian and Romanian) with groups (the Hungarians,
the Romanians); to obscure the generally low, though uctuating,
degree of groupness in this setting; to mistake the putative groups
invoked by ethnonational rhetoric for substantial things-in-the-world;
to accept, at least tacitly, the claims of nationalist organizations to
speak for the groups they claim to represent; and to neglect the every-
day contexts in which ethnic and national categories take on meaning
() In the US and much of northern and At the last census, conducted in , %
western Europe, nationality ordinarily means of the population of Cluj identied as Hungar-
citizenship, that is, membership of the state; ian. More recent statistics, however, suggest a
and nation and state are often used inter- smaller population identifying as Hungarian,
changeably. In central and eastern Europe, by at least among younger age cohorts. Of persons
contrast, nation and nationality do not refer getting married in , .% identied their
in the rst instance to the state, but ordinarily nationality as Hungarian. Of primary, middle
invoke an ethnocultural frame of reference school and secondary school students in -
independent ofand often cutting across , .%, .% and .%, respectively,
the boundaries ofstatehood and citizen- identied as Hungarian. Contextual dier-
ship. To identify oneself as Hungarian by ences in identication may account for part of
nationality in Transylvania is to invoke a the dierence, as might dierent age structures
state-transcending Hungarian ethnocultural of Romanian and Hungarian populations and
nation. In the text, following the usage in this dierential emigration rates during the
setting, I use ethnic and national inter- s.
changeably.

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and the processes through which ethnicity actually works in everyday

life.
Here, as elsewhere, the protagonists of the conict have been organi-
zations, not groups. The conict has pitted the towns three-term
mayorthe amboyant Romanian nationalist Gheorghe Funarand
the statewide Romanian nationalist parties against the Cluj-based
Democratic Association of Hungarians of Romania (DAHR), at once a
statewide political party with its electoral base in Transylvania and an
organization claiming to represent and further the interests of the
Hungarian minority in Romania. Rhetoric has been heated on both
sides. Mayor Funar has accused Hungary of harboring irredentist
designs on Transylvania (); he has called the DAHR a terrorist
organization; and he has accused Transylvanian Hungarians of secretly
collecting weapons, forming paramilitary detachments and planning an
attack on Romanians. Funar has ordered bilingual signs removed from
the few buildings that had them; banned proposed celebrations of the
Hungarian national holiday; called for the suspending of Hungarian
language broadcasts on Romanian state television; called for punish-
ment of citizens for displaying the Hungarian ag or singing the Hun-
garian anthem; and proposed to rename after Romanian personages the
few Cluj streets that bear the names of Hungarians.
The DAHR, for its part, is committed to a number of goals that
outrage Romanian nationalists (). It characterizes Hungarians in
Romania as an indigenous community entitled to an equal partnership
with the Romanian nation as a constituent element of the Transylvanian
statethereby directly challenging the prevailing (and constitutionally
enshrined) Romanian understanding of the state as a unitary nation-
state like France. At the same time, it characterizes Transylvanian Hun-
garians as an organic part of the Hungarian nation and as such claims the
right to cultivate relations with the mother country across the border,
which leads Romanian nationalists to call into question their loyalty to
the Romanian state. It demands collective rights for Hungarians as a
national minority and it demands autonomy, including territorial auto-
nomy, for areas in which Hungarians live as a local majority, thereby
raising the specter of separatism in the minds of Romanian nationalists.
It demands that Hungarians have their own institutional system in the
domain of education and cultureyet that this institutional system
() Transylvania had belonged to Hungary () The DAHR program can be found
for half a century before the First World War in English at http: //www.rmdsz.ro/angol/
and again for four years during the Second aboutus/prog.htm.
World War.

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should be nanced by the Romanian state. It demands the right to

public, state-funded education in Hungarian at every level and in every
branch of the educational system, including vocational education. It
demands the right to take entrance exams to every school and university
in Hungarian, even if the school or department to which the student is
applying carries out instruction in Romanian. And it demands the
re-establishment of an independent Hungarian university in Cluj and
the establishment of publicly funded but independent Hungarian lan-
guage radio and TV studios.
Like ethnic and nationalist organizations everywhere, the DAHR
claims to speak for the Hungarian minority in Romanian, often charac-
terizing it as a singular entity, the Hungariandom of Romania (a
romniai magyarsg). But no such entity exists (). The many Cluj
residents who self-identify as Hungarian are often sharply critical of the
DAHR and there is no evidence that the demands of the DAHR are the
demands of the Hungarians. On the question of a Hungarian
universitythe most contentious political issue of the last few yearsa
survey conducted by a Hungarian sociologist found that a plurality of
Hungarian university students in Cluj preferred an autonomous system
of Hungarian-language education within the existing university to the
DAHR goal of re-establishment of a separate Hungarian university
(Magyari-Nndor and Pter ). Most Hungarians, like most Roma-
nians, are largely indierent to politics and preoccupied with problems
of everyday lifeproblems that are not interpreted in ethnic terms.
Although survey data and election results suggest that they appear to
vote en bloc for the DAHR, most Hungarians are familiar only in a vague
way with the DAHR program. Similarly, there is no evidence that
Mayor Funars anti-Hungarian views are widely shared by the towns
Romanian residents. When Funar is praised, it is typically as a good
housekeeper (bun gospodar); he is given credit for sprucing up the
towns appearance and for providing comparatively good municipal
services. Almost everyoneRomanian and Hungarian aliketalks
about ethnic conict as something that comes from above and is stirred
up by politicians pursuing their own interests. The near-universal
refrain is that ethnicity is not a problem. To be sure, a similar
idiomor perhaps ideologyof everyday interethnic harmony can be
() Of course this point holds not only, or to in German as Staatsvlker or state peo-
especially, of the Hungarian minority, or of plesalso routinely reify those nations and
minorities generally. In Romania as elsewhere, characterize them as singular entities with a
those who claim to speak for dominant common will and common interests, where in
nationsnations that are closely identied fact no such entity exists.
with the states that bear their names, referred

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found in many other settings, including some deeply divided, violence-

plagued ones. So the idiom cannot be taken as evidence of the irrel-
evance of ethnicity. The point here is simply to underscore the gap
between nationalist organizations and the putative groups in whose
names they claim to speak.
Despite the continuous elite-level ethnopolitical conict in Cluj since
the fall of Ceausescu, groupness has generally remained low. At no
time did Hungarians and Romanians crystallize as distinct, solidary,
bounded groups; in this sense groupness failed to happen. The contrast
with Trgu Mures, another Transylvanian city where groups did crys-
tallize in , is instructive. In Trgu Mures, ethnically framed conict
over the control of a high school and over the control of local govern-
ment in the immediate aftermath of the fall of Ceausescu intensied and
broadened into a generalized conict over the ownership and control of
the ethnodemographically evenly divided city. The conict culminated
in mass assemblies and two days of street ghting that left at least six
dead and injured. In the days leading up to the violent denouement,
categories had become palpable, sharply bounded groups, united by
intensely felt collective solidarity and animated by a single overriding
distinction between us and them. The violence itself reinforced this
sense of groupness, which then subsided gradually as life returned to
normal and no further Hungarian-Romanian violence occurred, here or
elsewhere in Transylvania.
No such crystallization occurred in Cluj. There were, to be sure, a
few moments of moderately heightened groupness. One such
momentamong Hungariansoccurred when Mayor Funar ordered a
new plaque installed on the base of a monumental equestrian statue of
Matthias Corvinus, celebrated king of Hungary during the late fteenth
century, in the towns main square. The statue, erected at the turn of the
last century at a moment of and as a monument to, triumphant Hun-
garian nationalism, is perceived by many Hungarians as their own and
the new plaque deliberately aronted Hungarian national sensibilities
by emphasizing the (partly) Romanian origin of Matthias Corvinus and
representing himcontrary to the triumphalist image projected by the
statueas having been defeated in battle by his own nation, Moldavia
(Feischmidt ). Another moment occurred when archeological
excavations were begun in front of the statue, again in a manner calcu-
lated to aront Hungarian national sensibilities by highlighting the ear-
lier Romanand by extension, Romanianpresence on the site. A third
moment occurred in March , when Mayor Funar tried to bar
Hungarians from carrying out their annual March celebration com-

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memorating the revolution of , this years celebration, in the ses-

quicentennial year, having special signicance (Brubaker and Feisch-
midt ) (). A nal moment occurred in June at the time of a
much-hyped soccer match in Bucharest between the national teams of
Romania and Hungary. In Cluj, the match was televised on a huge
outdoor screen in the main square and some fans chanted Afara, afara,
cu Ungurii din tara! (out, out, the Hungarians out of the country!)
and vandalized cars with Hungarian license plates (Adevarul de Cluj
).
In each of these cases, groupnessespecially among Hungarians,
though in the nal case among Romanians as wellwas heightened, but
only to a modest degree and only for a passing moment. The rst event
occasioned a substantial but isolated Hungarian protest, the second a
smaller protest, the third some concern that the commemoration might
be broken up (in the event it proceeded without serious incident) and the
last some moments of concern for those who happened to be in the town
center during and immediately after the soccer match. But even at these
maximally group-like moments, there was no overriding sense of
bounded and solidary groupness for those not immediately involved in
the events (). In short, when one shifts ones focus from presupposed
groups to variable groupness and treats high levels of groupness as a
contingent event, a crystallization, something that happens, then what is
striking about Cluj in the s is that groupness remained low and
groups failed to happen or to crystallize.
() To Romanian nationalists, Hunga- projects of Mayor Funar wereat least for
rians commemoration of is illegitimate, somea joking matter. One further incident is
for it celebrates a regime that was as much worth mentioning in this connection. In ,
nationalist as revolutionary, aspiring toand a long-closed Hungarian consulate re-opened
briey securingunitary control over Tran- in Cluj, reecting a warming of relations
sylvania. Romanian nationalist mythology between Budapest and the newly elected pro-
commemorates not the revolution, but the western government in Bucharest. Funar
guerilla struggle against the Hungarian revolu- protestedin vainagainst its opening and
tionary regime, led by Avram Iancu, to whom a when it opened, tried to ne it for ying the
colossal monument was erected under Funars Hungarian ag. A few weeks after its opening,
sponsorship in . ve men pulled up in a pickup truck, placed an
() Even for those who were involved in extendable ladder against the side of the build-
the events, one should be cautious about infer- ing, andremoved the ag, in broad daylight,
ring an overriding sense of groupness. I was in as a small crowd looked on. The next day, they
Cluj in the summer of , when excavations were apprehended by the police; Funar char-
in the main Hungarian square were about to acterized them as Romanian heroes.
begin. I was staying with the family of a lead- Elsewhere, this sort of incidentwhich could
ing gure of the DAHR, albeit one of the more easily be construed as involving the desecration
liberal gures. At one point, he proposed: of a sacred national symbolhas been enough
Menjnk sni? [Shall we go dig?] At a to trigger a riot. Here, nobody paid much
moment of overriding groupness, such a joke attention; the incident was coded as farce, not
would be unthinkable; here, the nationalist as sacred drama.

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To note the relatively low degree of groupness in Cluj and the gap
between organizations and the putative groups they claim to represent, is
not to suggest that ethnicity is somehow not real in this setting, or that
it is purely an elite phenomenon. Yet to understand how ethnicity works,
it may help to begin not with the Romanians and the Hungarians as
groups, but with Romanian and Hungarian as categories. Doing so
suggests a dierent set of questions than those that come to mind when
we begin with groups. Starting with groups, one is led to ask what
groups want, demand or aspire towards; how they think of themselves
and others; and how they act in relation to other groups. One is led
almost automatically by the substantialist language to attribute identity,
agency, interests and will to groups. Starting with categories, by
contrast, invites us to focus on processes and relations rather than
substances. It invites us to specify how people and organizations do
things with and to ethnic and national categories; how such categories
are used to channel and organize processes and relations; and how cat-
egories get institutionalized and with what consequences. It invites us to
ask how, why and in what contexts ethnic categories are usedor not
usedto make sense of problems and predicaments, to articulate ain-
ities and ailiations, to identify commonalities and connections, and to
frame stories and self-understandings.
Consider here just two of the many ways of pursuing a category-
centered rather than a group-centered approach to ethnicity in Cluj.
First, a good deal of common-sense cultural knowledge about the social
world and ones place in it, here as in other settings, is organized around
ethnonational categories (). This includes knowledge of ones own
and others ethnocultural nationality and the ability to assign unknown
others to ethnonational categories on the basis of cues such as language,
accent, name, sometimes dress, hair style, and even phenotype. It
includes knowledge of what incumbents of such categories are like (),
how they typically behave and how ethnonational category membership
matters in various spheres of life. Such common-sense category-based
() On categories as repositor[ies] for testify to the existence (and the content) of the
common sense knowledge generally (Sche- category-based knowledge that is being over-
glo : ), see Sacks , I, -, - ridden. On the general phenomenon of
. For cognitive perspectives on social cat- modiers that work by asserting that what
egories as structures of knowledge, with spe- is generally known about members of a
cial regard to ethnic, racial and other natural category is not applicable to some particular
kind, like categories, see Rothbart and Taylor member, see Sacks (), I, -. Among
; Hamilton and Sherman ; Hirsch- Hungarianseven liberal, cosmopolitan Hun-
feld . gariansI have on several occasions heard
() Even when such common-sense, someone referred to as Romn, de rendes
category-based stereotypical knowledge is (Romanian, but quite all right) or something to
overridden, the very manner of overriding may that eect.

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knowledge shapes everyday interaction, gures in stories people tell

about themselves and others and provides ready-made explanations for
certain events or states of aairs. For Hungarians, for example, catego-
rizing an unknown person as Hungarian or Romanian may govern how
one interacts with him or her, determining not only the language but also
the manner in which one will speak, a more personal and condential
(bizalmas) style often being employed with fellow Hungarians. Or for
Romanians, categorizing two persons speaking Hungarian in a mixed-
language setting as Hungarian (rather than, for example, as friends who
happen to be speaking Hungarian) provides a ready-made explanation
for their conduct, it being common-sense knowledge about Hungarians
that they will form a bisericuta (clique, literally: small church) with
others of their kind, excluding co-present Romanians, whenever they
have the chance. Or again for Hungarians, categorically organized
common-sense knowledge provides a ready-made framework for per-
ceiving dierential educational and economic opportunities as structur-
ed along ethnic lines, explaining such dierentials in terms of what they
know about the bearing of ethnic nationality on grading, admissions,
hiring, promotion and ring decisions and justifying the commonly
voiced opinion that we [Hungarians] have to work twice as hard to get
ahead (Feischmidt ; Fox ). These and many other examples
suggest that ethnicity is, in important part, a cognitive phenomenon, a
way of seeing and interpreting the world and that, as such, it works in
and through categories and category-based common sense knowledge.
Ethnic categories shape institutional as well as informal cognition and
recognition. They not only structure perception and interpretation in
the ebb and ow of everyday interaction but channel conduct through
oicial classications and organizational routines. Thus ethnic (and
other) categories may be used to allocate rights, regulate actions, distri-
bute benets and burdens, construct category-specic institutions,
identify particular persons as bearers of categorical attributes, cultivate
populations or, at the extreme, eradicate unwanted elements ().
In Clujas in Romania generallyethnic categories are not institu-
tionalized in dramatic ways. Yet there is one important set of institutions
built, in part, around ethnic categories. This is the school system ().
() On population politics and the meta- around ethnic categories, with two Hungar-
phor of the gardening state, see Holquist : ian churches (Roman Catholic and Calvinist)
; Bauman ; Weiner . Genocide, as and two Romanian churches (Orthodox and
Bauman observes, diers from other murders Greek-Catholic or Uniate). With aging con-
in having a category for its object (: , gregations, dwindling inuence and increased
italics in original). competition from less ethnically marked
() Traditional churches, too, are built neo-Protestant denominations, the traditional

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In Cluj, as in other Transylvanian cities, there is a separate Hungarian-

language school system paralleling the mainstream system and running
from preschool through high school. These are not private schools, but
part of the state school system. Not all persons identifying themselves as
Hungarian attend Hungarian schools, but most do (- percent in
grades -, smaller proportions, though still substantial majorities, in
later grades) (). In Cluj, moreover, there are also parallel tracks at the
university level in many elds of study.
Categories need ecological niches in which to survive and ourish;
the parallel school system provides such a niche for Hungarian as an
ethnonational category. It is a strategically positioned niche. Hungarian
schools not only provide a legitimate institutional home and a protected
public space for the category. They also generate the social structural
foundations for a small Hungarian world within the larger Romanian
one (Feischmidt ). Since the schools shape opportunity structures
and contact probabilities and thereby inuence friendship patterns (and,
at the high school and university level, marriage patterns as well), this
world is to a certain extent a self-reproducing one. Note that the (partial)
reproduction of this social worldthis interlocking set of social rela-
tionships linking school, friendship circles and familydoes not require
strong nationalist commitments or group loyalties. Ethnic networks can
be reproduced without high degrees of groupness, largely through the
logic of contact probabilities and opportunity structures and the resul-
ting moderately high degrees of ethnic endogamy ().
This brief case study has sought to suggest that even in a setting of
intense elite-level ethnic conict and (by comparison to the United
States) deeply rooted and stable ethnic identications, one can analyze
the workings of ethnicity without employing the language of bounded
groups.

V. Conclusion

What are we studying when we study ethnicity and ethnic conict?

This paper has suggested that we need not frame our analyses in terms
churches are less signicant than schools as Romanians. This suggests a moderately high
institutional loci of ethnic categories. degree of ethnic endogamy, but only modera-
() Data are drawn from gures provided tely high, for about percent of all marriages
by the School Inspectorate of Cluj County. involving Hungarians were mixed marriages.
() Of the Hungarians who married in Data were compiled from forms lled out by
Cluj in , nearly percent married other couples, consulted at the Cluj branch of the
Hungarians, while about percent married National Commission for Statistics.

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of ethnic groups and that it may be more productive to focus on practical

categories, cultural idioms, cognitive schemas, commonsense
knowledge, organizational routines and resources, discursive frames,
institutionalized forms, political projects, contingent events and vari-
able groupness. It should be noted in closing, however, that by framing
our inquiry in this way and by bringing to bear a set of analytical pers-
pectives not ordinarily associated with the study of ethnicitycognitive
theory, ethnomethodology, conversation analysis, network analysis,
organizational analysis and institutional theory, for examplewe may
end up not studying ethnicity at all. It may be that ethnicity is simply a
convenientthough in certain respects misleadingrubric under which
to group phenomena that, on the one hand, are highly disparate and, on
the other, have a great deal in common with phenomena that are not
ordinarily subsumed under the rubric of ethnicity (). In other words,
by raising questions about the unit of analysisthe ethnic groupwe
may end up questioning the domain of analysis: ethnicity itself. But that
is an argument for another occasion.

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